


Dreaming on

by Elfwreck



Category: Changeling: the Dreaming
Genre: Aging, Gen, Gift Fic, Magic, Misses Clause Challenge, Spiders, Yuletide, fae, sluagh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 23:48:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elfwreck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melisenda was strange long before she knew she was fae.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreaming on

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PrimrosePixie](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=PrimrosePixie).



> PrimrosePixie, *who are you?* Tell me so I can change the recipient to your AO3 name!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this; it was a delight to remember what I love about the creepy-crawly Sluagh.
> 
> Beta'd by sinngrace, who was terrifically helpful in keeping it coherent (for some values of "coherent") and making sure it had an actual ending point. Thanks, sinngrace!

She remembers the 60's as a time of color and bliss and strange movements in the shadows. She left her birth-family, staid and conservative, when she was sixteen, by stepping into a bus painted with more colors than she could count, took her new name and never looked back. She laughed and danced and wore the dark bold colors of her ancestors, and skipped through the empty corridors of schools closed for summer and skulked in the corners of supermarkets, and everyone thought she was on drugs.

Melisenda took no drugs. She didn't need them. She saw hints of rainbows and shadows around people's bodies, saw the faces of spirits in the trees and the water, and learned that even among hippies, it was prudent not to mention these things all the time. Only when other people were tripping could she freely describe all that she saw.

So she did. She told stories of the battles between the hungry fire-spirits that ached for coal and the greedy earth-spirits who denied it to them. Stories of the rain so lonely, falling so far and so long to find companionship in a puddle or a lake. Stories of spiders weaving secret tapestries with all the colors they stole away in their little web-bundles, of how they drank the souls of smaller beings and use that life-energy to build silken battlements to hold off demons that would feast on mankind.

"And that's why I always make sure there's at least one spiderweb, everywhere I sleep," she said, and the wide-eyed circle passing the pipe nodded sagely, as if she'd said something wise. And when the pipe reached her, she held it skyward and whispered thanks to Grandmother Smoke, and then passed it along. If her hair glimmered darkly in the twilight, nobody mentioned it.

When the soldiers came home from Vietnam, she went to an airport to offer them protection and welcome-home; she handed out chrysalises with a tiny baby spider in each. One of the soldiers didn't understand, and he lashed out, striking her with heavy fists and the edge of his keys; he sliced open her throat and she remembers him saying _sorry sorry sorry_ waiting for the ambulance. She watched her voice spill out red on the ground, and tried to hold his hand to say _it's okay; my friends will fix it_ but he kept shaking his head. The doctors, who worked a magic she'd never understood, wouldn't let her friends in the hospital. Melisenda was permitted no dragonflies to stitch the wound closed, no spider-silk to hold a poultice to it while it healed. They wouldn't give her fireflies for brightness nor junebugs for color nor bullfrogs for depth, so her voice has none of those now. She did managed to eat a dandelion puff, so she has _some_ voice, a frail wisp that carries but never penetrates.

She couldn't hold story-circle anymore, so she wrote some of her stories, and sold them, but machines were never her friend, and when publishers demanded words written in light instead of ink, she was lost, and stopped publishing. Besides, the spiders were never entirely happy with her sharing their accomplishments; one never knew when the enemies would notice such scribblings.

She felt herself shift, slowly slowly, her long black hair turning silver thread by thread, her gleaming bronze skin fading to dull sand. Her fingertips are no longer flower-petals; they have become seed-pods, withered shells hiding yesterday's secrets and tomorrow's truths. She watched the pages of the calendar slip away, like a trail of ants, and could not think of any barrier that could stop them. The spiders would not help her with this.

She remembers, as most of the younger fae do not, the changing. The time when Glamour was thin and sparse and you had to dance for _hours_ under the new moon in the snow to activate a simple cantrip. And then the gates opened, just a bit, so and power and grandeur leaked into the banal world that weighed so heavily on her. She has been drunk on sips of that power for years, for decades, and now, today, as the Sidhe stride across the banal lands once more, spreading Glamour as casually as they breathe and dance and fuck, she laughs (whisper-laugh, almost a hiss) once more at their ebullient arrogance.

They call her Grump, and think it an insult, and she smiles with her decades of secrets veiled behind her dandelion-puff voice. They sidle away from her, from her bent-over height and hard, wrinkled hands, and thinks she does not notice, but she had lived many, many years as an outsider in the banal world, and their wariness is familiar to her. Comfortable, sometimes, when she cares to notice comforts. They sometimes ask if she's in the wrong court, aren't you Unseelie, old woman, dark woman of spiders, and she clasps their hands and whispers gleefully "Not yet! Not yet!" Such delights yet to see and enjoy: the wriggle of the many legs of the centipede, the noble lusts of the mantis, the stealthy scouting of the roaches.

Melisenda shares her stories with others of her kith, and the childling Sluagh look at her through their fingers or hold twigs over their faces or peer over the tops of musty books, drinking the lessons of how to evade banality by hiding in the gutters as it rolls past, all full of light and bluster. She flirts with Redcaps and cackles softly when they threaten her; she has no fear of angry young men nor vicious young women--and there are very, very few old Redcaps. She does not pinch the cheeks of wildling Sidhe. Much.

She sleeps during the day under bushes in the park, wrapped in a blanket of spider-silk, and crawls out at night to see the web of lights stretched over the Rainbow City. She cannot see the web of metal over the streets at night, but she can feel it, layer upon layer of lightning-power and zooming travel and all the little terrors of moving too fast past too many flickering shapes. She scratches protective runes in the dirt with her fingernail, and drinks in the Glamour that flows in with the fog.

She bundles up her blanket in a broken-looking basket made of twigs, and shuffles toward the train station where her kith-friends will be waiting for her, hiding under the platforms. Tonight she will show them how to grab at the legs of children stepping off the train, to catch bits of lace from their socks or shiny laces from their shoes. Then she will show them how to weave traps from the broken threads to entangle unwanted visitors. Next time a Sidhe lordling decides to invade their homes, they’ll be ready.


End file.
